Of all the calendars on the wall, one was a picture of a white jasmine flower, which someone had thrown in through the window as a gift for me on a last day of the old year.
A white jasmine flower on a thin blue veil like mist and smoke, stuck to meager branches just like brush strokes made by a weak old scholar.
During the first days of the New Year, I have been beholding the flower as if out of a certain urge in the recesses of my heart. To my wife, on the contrary, not only white jasmine flowers but all calendars on the wall were no focus for her. I was, it seemed, the only thing in the world that caught her attention.
Once, in the small hours of the morning, I woke up all perplexed. I switched on the light. In the dark night, the room turned cold, yellow color faintly dancing bore in itself something secret and mysterious.
I was amazed when I looked at the calendar on the wall: the white jasmine flower had disappeared, amid the sky – blue only existed its illusory darkened physical being.
“Quite strange!” I shouted and woke my wife up. She robbed in the blanket like a lazy cat.
“Many things are strange!” She said in a sober voice as if she had never slept in her whole life! I looked at her, with closed eyes, saying, “No white jasmine flower on the calendar”.
Quite indifferently, she retorted, “A flower is a flower and can never be a matter. Go back to sleep.” Then she turned her back to me, covering her with the blanket.
I stood in the center of the room. Unexpected gusts of fire – hot wind swept over my head. I was dazzled and dropped down on the cold, wet floor.
“That’s my story, doctor.”
The benevolent-looking doctor looked me straight in the eye, asking, “When did you get married?”
“You’re to examine me, not to ask me personal questions,” I retorted.
“Things are closely related to each other, entangled as a website. Nothing is personal”.
I suddenly stunted and began my story, “I met her on a real cold day at a beauty contest in town, as a reporter of a provincial newspaper to take photos. Her figure was excellent, three ideal measures – breast, waist, and bottom – 85, 60, 88 against her 1.7m height. Every point on her body was extremely attractive, even a down – so I left my wife – a country kindergarten instructor – to be with her.”
“You fabricated your wife’s adultery scene as grounds for divorce?” He interrupted.
I stammered, “At the wedding ceremony, my wife came as a guest, though unwanted. She was in her white clothes, a white hat and white shoes, looking like a sad white snow mass. Her present for me was a white box.”
“What was inside?” asked the doctor, excited.
“I hadn’t opened it yet.”
Shaking his head, the doctor said, “That’s enough. Go home and drink four portions of tranquillizer and open the box to see what in inside it.”
My wife was sleeping, and was sometimes shivering, maybe she was having dreams. I awkwardly opened the box made of cardboard. Before my eyes was a white fabric jasmine flower that looked like a genuine one with its white smooth skin and its toothed contour line on the calyx. Mechanically/ I put the box into my front pocket and took my bike out of the house I rode like a sleep – walker in the dense mist.
I arrived at my ex-wife’s house at dawn. A pretty little house on the outskirts of the town.
Her old mother, with her toothless mouth told me that when I re-married, she left home, left her children and became a nun. He was now shelteredin Tích Phương pagoda.
I arrived at the pagoda at sunrise.
A forest of white jasmine flowers whitening the pagoda orchard.
A monk was gathering fallen flowers to the center of the orchard. He told me that my wife had risen to Nirvana at midnight.
I trembled when I place the box with a white jasmine flower inside onto the altar. Then I went out looking up to the immense indistinct sky.
When I arrived home, it was midday.
The calendar with the white jasmine flower was there on the wall, intact.
- Đức Ban